Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

There are a great many real-world engineering jobs that involve the spec'ing, selection, and integration of COTS components. Not all engineers work on the component design level.

This. One of our mentors engineers ocean data collection and transmission systems. Most of his designs are 80-90% COTS parts integrated with the critical 10%-20% that make the system meet the requirements. There are some major companies out there who sell and service operating systems that are 90% open source and 10% custom. When a COTS product meets a one-off requirement at a decent price, designing and building a custom solution is bad engineering.

Likewise, our team starts with pre-engineered COTS drive trains, gearboxes, motors, and mounting brackets when available, and designs and assembles them to meet the requirements of our strategy, which was decided in order to meet the requirements of the game. I can't think of a time that we used anything mechanical that was more complex than a gearbox without making some modifications to it to suit our game strategy. Last year we turned the 2015 KoP chassis into an H-drive, this year we're making a 10 wheel drive starting from the same kit. We were working on a leading wedge for our robot that matches the one AndyMark will be selling soon; once we expected this to happen, we did the prototype but canceled the design and construction of the competition wedge, and moved on to even more manipulator design. This is a miniature version of the real-world situation in many, many fields.

The $400 limit does a pretty good job of preventing "prefab" robots. If a team showed up with a robot built and programmed 100% according to plans available from a vendor or on-line, there would be little STEM inspiration. When a team shows up with a well-running original design that is composed of 90+% COTS parts, learning and inspiration are all but certain to have been part of the process.